A JOURNEY TO THE CAPE: Sunday 30th March, 2014

There I was, on the foggiest of late March days with an atrocious weather forecast ahead, on board the MV John H sailing north out of Orient Point.  Not my favorite ship by any stretch of the imagination. Built exclusively for the Cross Sound Ferry company in 1989 she is huge by ferry standards, practical, yet uninspiring in design.  And given that she is a mere quarter of a century old her outward condition seems tired and shabby. No matter – she is strong, and when going astern out of port her engines sound as engines going astern ought to sound.  Loud.

I avoided eating in the cafeteria as it was Sunday lunchtime and full of larger-than-life people standing in line and ordering fries with everything.  Even with those family-size, heart-shaped pretzels which look as if they’ve been hanging in their glass server since the beginning of Lent.  Just a cup of coffee for me.  Seattle’s Best!

Guaranteed a seat I chose the “Pets in this Section” part of ship and settled down to watch people, animals, and take notes.  I think I was the only person with a notepad and pen.  All others (with the exception of one young lady who wore the thickest of sunglasses on that dull afternoon and picked pieces of salad out of a plastic container on her lap) were engrossed in their smartphones or tablets, or else watching the giant television screen on the far bulkhead.  Screening?  CNN reporting on the latest piece of non-news about a missing airliner.

I was trying to remember the last time I had made this journey.  Mid-autumn possibly, over a year ago, for I spent day after day fishing the ponds of the Outer Cape.  No fishing for me on this occasion. It will be a short break.  Three days in which to breathe good air, reconnect with a few places, and maybe even do a bit of hiking.

EARLY RADIO MEMORIES (7) Radio Centurion Closing Down...

Another cold snap in March 2014 with flurries of snow early this morning, and a chance to conclude this series of rambling radio memories.  Or should I say “sign off?”  There will be further chapters but they will be found on the “55555” blog and only occasionally linked here.  Besides, that highly irregular and illegal radio station in north Worcester was about to come to an abrupt end.

It was Easter Eve 1972.  April Fools’ Day also, and a special Easter weekend programme had been prepared for the following day, recorded on a new seven inch reel of tape that was waiting in its box on the table ready to be threaded into the recorder.  But later that afternoon when I went up to listen to and preview the tape I was concerned to find it already on the spools ready to play.  Who could have done that?  I shrugged it off.  Perhaps my brother.  Or one of my parents out of curiosity.  I powered up the machine, put on a set of headphones, and rotated the “play” switch.  What I heard next chilled me to the bone.

Instead of the introductory music that I had been using for months there was a man’s voice, deep and with a definite air of authority, which repeated this message.  Three times.

“Close this station down.  This station is operating illegally.  We have found you out.  Close this station down!”

The back-story to all of this was very unfortunate. The VHF signal emitted by the transmitter was not only more powerful than I had measured (and I had not measured its east-west range,) it was also, unbeknown to me, producing a harmonic signal which was radiating in the 68-88 MHz band – right in the middle of frequencies used by the West Mercia Constabulary.  Yep!  I was busted!

Yet it was a very gentle “bust.”  This was due to the fact that when the police (who had used the General Post Office detector vans) located the source of the signal(s) and realized that they were emanating from the home of a much respected and highly popular clergyman, it was decided to send the matter upstairs to a certain Chief Inspector.  And Chief Inspector Hunt was not only a friend of the family but a regular worshipper at the parish church.  So a quiet conversation took place; the officer visited the house, a message was left, and that was that.   No fine.  Not even a caution. No confiscation of equipment.  All very fair and sporting. 

I’m not sure if my parents were annoyed or not, for little was said.  I’m sure that my father had an amusing time of it all for there was a twinkle in his eye that weekend.  And my mother’s mood never changed.  But it was the end of clandestine broadcasting from St Stephen’s Vicarage.

Is there an Epilogue to this tale?  If there is then it’s certainly not a cautionary one for it was fun while it lasted and I have no regrets.  The transmitter was dismantled.  The recording equipment remained wired up as from time to time I would record a show and send it to be broadcast on the equally illegal Super Radio station in the next town of Malvern.  I would even record a fifteen minute demonstration tape and send it to Radio Atlantis, an offshore station operating from a ship off the Dutch coast from 1973-74, and I later learned that they had played five minutes of it on air.  What a claim to fame!

But time was moving on, and I was moving on.  It was the end of the care-free and often cavalier free radio days (Radio North Sea closed in 1974,) academic study beckoned with a vengeance, and getting into university was the sole interest and purpose.  Was it the end of radio for me?  No.  But that tale has not yet been written.

Early Radio Memories (6) On Air.

The name of the station came as a result of Classics homework one evening - an essay on the structure of the Roman Army.  The transmitter was tuned to 100 Mhz so the title Radio Centurion came to mind.  And a banner was painted with this name to staple to the wall of the new "studio." The need to put together bits of equipment required more space so I moved upstairs to the second floor of the house. (In U.S. parlance that would be the third floor!) What had been a playroom was now to be a broadcast studio.  And the vary fact that the antenna was repositioned some twenty feet higher would surely have some benefit.

Equipment?  It was all rather basic with the exception of the record deck.  I had saved enough money to buy a quality deck and one day my father drove me to a big discount store in Birmingham to pick up a Garrard SP25 Mark IV, not a bad piece of kit for its day.  (See above.) The family reel-to-reel had been commandeered with its microphone, and a birthday present of a PYE cassette recorder completed the list.

For the next few months Radio Centurion would attempt to broadcast twice a week - each recorded show being half an hour in length. The first would go out on a Saturday late afternoon (times did vary!) and the second mid-evening on Sunday.  Now with such simple equipment half an hour of programming took at least an hour and a half to create. Sometimes more. This was done during the week and I have a strong suspicion that my school work suffered a little!

What did we play?  It was a mainly progressive rock music interspersed with jazz, on account that I had found a tall pile of jazz albums in a church sale one weekend.

Who listened?  Apart from the school friends who lived in north Worcester I have absolutely no idea. A few members of the church youth club said that they did from time to time.  And a few parents would nod their approval.  But there was one group of listeners in particular who would really make a difference.

Early Radio Memories (5) Hoisting the Jolly Roger!

Finding electronic components to build an FM transmitter, slightly more powerful and more stable than the one borrowed, was easy.  This was the early 1970s. A time when it was still possible to find television and radio repair shops in most towns.  (Yes, people repaired televisions and radios!)  It was simply a matter of drawing up a shopping list of needed components and handing it to the man behind the counter who always wore glasses and a brown cotton work coat.  (Why did they always wear brown work coats?) He would say something like, "Be ready for you in about an hour." And an hour later a satisfied customer would leave clutching a paper bag filled with resistors, capacitors, transistors and many more goodies.

My local electronic supplier was Jack Porter.  His corner shop stood on the corner of College Street facing the magnificent Worcester Cathedral.  I would pass this way at least twice a day to and fro-ing from school. A dark and dingy shop.  So dark that on some cloudy days it was often impossible to see if Jack was in there at all.  His shelves and back rooms of cardboard boxes were an electronic cornucopia, and he boasted that not only were his prices the lowest in the city but also that he could match and supply any valve (U.S. tube) for any radio dating back to the Second World War.  I wonder what happened to old Jack Porter?  His shop closed many years ago and has been many things since.  Its latest incarnation is an estate agency.  (U.S.  Real estate office.)

Building the transmitter took but a few hours one weekend, but it had to sit on a shelf for another week before I found time to run some initial tests.  I enlisted the help of a school friend called John Buchanan who lived just around the corner.  (I wonder what happened to him also.)  We connected the transmitter to a reel-to-reel tape recorder onto which was loaded a tape of Dvorak's New World Symphony.  A ten foot length of coaxial cable connected the unit to a four foot telescopic antenna - which in turn was mounted atop an old fishing rod and fastened to the corner of the balcony outside my bedroom window.  The battery was connected, the tape was running, and we got on our bikes.

Each with a transistor radio the plan was to test the radius of the transmitter which was tuned to broadcast on 100 Mhz.  John would ride south and I would ride north, noting the signal strength every few hundred yards.  The reception to the north petered out after less than half a mile, but southwards the music was still audible a mile and a half down the road.

Back at the house I realized that I was now in control of a real, working radio station.  We celebrated with a bottle of orange pop and a packet of Jaffa Cakes!  But there were so many questions running through my mind.  What would the station be called?  When would it broadcast?  And what would it broadcast?

Where Jack Porter once stood.

Early Radio Memories (4)

In the summer of 1971 free radio was in the air, culturally and on a number of frequencies across the United Kingdom and Western Europe.  Those of us living in the English Midlands would listen to Radio North Sea (Nordsee) International on shortwave during the daytime and on medium wave (AM) after dark.  Radio Caroline was still there, and Radio Veronica was another option (although her programming was mainly in Dutch.)  There were rumours of land-based “pirates” in London and other large cities, and despite the attempts of the BBC to provide a pop music service and the promise of local independent commercial radio to come (it came in 1973) the predominant culture was free radio, offshore or otherwise.

British politics crept in to the situation.  Both the outgoing Labour Party, and the incoming Conservative Party (after the 1970 General Election) continued the jamming of RNI and other offshore stations.  There was strong condemnation from the supporters of free radio with leaflets and press statements such as this:

As we write this, Radio Nordsee International is being jammed by the British Government “in the interests of Czechoslovakia.”  So the Government has now sunk to such a depth that it will employ Communist methods in support of a Communist occupation regime.

This Government has been determined to crush free enterprise radio by any method it thinks it can get away with.  The trickery, the blatant lies and now the jamming betray an utter contempt for freedom and democracy.

Strong stuff, eh? 

Meanwhile in a much smaller way the free radio revolution was ever a topic of conversation at the King’s School, Worcester, where a small group of us were being shown a small plastic box that had a wire antenna, two input jacks and a nine volt battery clip.  It was a small and primitive FM transmitter which would take both a microphone and an audio signal simultaneously.  The owner, the older brother of a classmate of mine, was producing short programmes on reel to reel tape and cassette to be broadcast every Sunday in the neighboring town of Malvern.  With careful tuning the transmitter range was about one mile.  Looking at the circuitry and design I knew that I could copy it and even improve upon it.  Later that day I asked if I may borrow the transmitter for a couple of days during the week.

He said yes.

Decisions, decisions...

It's a major snowstorm, and we could wake up to over six inches accumulation of snow over ice.  The "going" will be difficult tomorrow morning, if not hazardous.  No one in their right mind ought to be battling to get out of their house or driveway before the situation is safer.  So worship has been cancelled tomorrow morning.

It's odd, but every time I have to make this decision, and after I have done so (with the stalwart collaboration of the two churchwardens) I feel a strange mixture of relief, guilt and anxiety.  Relief that the decision has been made; guilt that the decision of a few will be imposed on the desire of some, letting them down as it were; and anxiety that we will open our eyes in the morning to see a mere inch of melting snow and warm sunshine.

But we do our best.  And I'm sure that the Almighty understands that.  We're in a deep snowdrift if he doesn't...

In the Bleak Mid Winter

It is mid-February in a part of the world that used to celebrate Washington’s birthday (George, that is, not Denzel) but now loudly and mindlessly announces its latest sales on something called Presidents’ Day weekend.  And there’s snow on the ground.  Actually there has been snow on the ground for a few weeks, the bottom layer of which has been compacted into ice that seems tougher than steel.  And yesterday more white insult was added to frozen injury to the tune of seven inches.  A brief lull of thawing rain but that turned back into snow overnight.

These are days when I run my fingers along the spines of many angling books on the shelves and wonder how long it will be before the ponds and streams will thaw and the fish start feeding again.  And when I can semi-comfortably stand on a bank and throw a line into these waters.

It will be a while longer I think.  Another storm is forecast for late tomorrow.